Asta is a Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Centre for Sexuality, Race and Gender Justice at Kent Law School.
In January 2026, new statutory restrictions on the advertising of food and drink high in fat, salt and sugar came into effect. The law prohibits paid advertisements for these products online at all times and on television before 9pm. This appears to be a positive step, which aims to reduce children’s exposure to advertising of unhealthy, commercial food. While the advert ban is framed as a step forward towards the fight against child poor nutrition, in this blog, I reflect on its potential, or lack thereof, to produce wider cultural change in current dietary patterns.
Recent studies in nutrition science demonstrate that the UK has now fully transitioned from traditional to ultra-processed food (UPF) dietary patterns. This means that the UK diet is, in effect, a UPF diet, with the highest consumption levels in Europe. Ultra-processed foods are industrially manufactured products and drinks made from modified ingredients and additives, designed for shelf life, convenience and engineered hyper-palatability, and while scientists continue to debate the exact definitional boundaries of what products and drinks fall under the UPF category, associations between UPF consumption and non-communicable diseases (such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, inflammatory bowel disease, various cancers, frailty, depression, and dementia) are fairly well established in scientific research. Children in the UK obtain the majority of their energy intake from UPFs. This transition from traditional to UPF dietary patterns has signalled a profound cultural and material shift in everyday eating practices in the UK, affecting homes, schools, workplaces, public and private institutions.
And yet, despite this context, the advertising ban now in force appears concerningly misaligned with the nature and scale of the problem it purports to address. As I have argued elsewhere, the risk posed by UPF consumption is not simply a matter of individual products being high in certain nutrients (e.g. high in fat, salt or sugar). Instead, it lies in the long-term, cumulative effects of sustained reliance on a diet composed predominantly of UPFs, commercially produced using cheap ingredients and designed to be hyper-palatable to increase the sale volumes. These effects unfold over time, gradually deteriorating overall health and, in reality, erasing legal accountability for the slow harm that UPF markets and UPF marketeers cumulatively produce. One of the difficulties of course in responding to and accounting for these effects lies in the law’s framing of harm.
The UK food law relies on a legal model that identifies ‘less healthy’ products by assessing their macronutrient composition; that is, how much fat, sugar or salt products contain. The famous traffic light paradigm is based on regulating macronutrients, so are the new advertising restrictions. In other words, legally, if a product exceeds the prescribed threshold, it is considered to be ‘unhealthy’ and thus advertising restrictions will apply. This approach however misses the fact that many UPFs fall within the acceptable macronutrient range due to reformulation. Indeed, ultra-processing techniques with the use of additives allow food manufacturers to quickly adapt their food formulations to present products as low in fat, sugar or salt, or as high in fiber, without considering the quality and type of macronutrients at play. While there remains scientific debate over which products fall within the broad category of UPFs, and perhaps most importantly, whether all seemingly attributed to UPFs carry the same health risks, there is increasing scientific consensus that the macronutrient-based paradigm fails to adequately account for the harm currently generated through UPF markets.
Accountability concerns are further complicated by food law’s current conceptualisation of harm as individualised and readily attributable to specific food producers. This framing however fails to capture ‘slow harm’ that accumulates over time and is produced cumulatively, often by multiple UPF producers. The UK’s advertising ban too is constructed around the identification of unhealthy products so that it can then regulate communication about these products. Such narrow regulatory focus on banning advertising of so-called unhealthy foods, I suggest, is unlikely to produce meaningful change, given the current dominance of UPFs in children’s everyday life. UPFs are now deeply entrenched into social habits, domestic practices, institutional provisioning and economic constraints in the UK, which makes advertising only one part of a much larger food matrix.
So, while the recent advertising restriction is politically attractive, its practical significance is highly questionable. The advertising ban attempts to protect children by limiting commercial visibility of ‘unhealthy’ foods and drinks, without attending to the routine, mundane and ordinary food practices that children are subjected to in different food environments. As I have argued, UPF-related harm is not spectacular, sudden or easily detectable. It is also not the outcome of one unhealthy product or one advertisement or even a series of advertisements. The slow harm associated with UPF diets emerges from the day-to-day food practices of eating, caring and feeding, that are socially embedded, financially and economically determined, and culturally normalised, some that are shaped by advertising culture, and some that are not. Thus, law and public health policies focused on advertising restrictions alone risk locating the problem within unhelpfully narrow boundaries of possible interventions. Whilst controlling visibility of commercialised, unhealthy foods and drinks can help steer behaviour towards ‘better’ health outcomes, it is nevertheless crucial, I argue, to pay close attention to and continue to observe the conditions that make UPFs the default option across income levels and age groups. This demands acknowledgement of, and a call to change, system-produced dependence on UPFs. That dependence is maintained through the economics of household food provision, the sourcing arrangements and contracts that structure school meals, planning and licensing decisions that determine outlet density, the everyday rhythms of work and consumption that favour packaged convenience and many more. Such reform, however, requires time and resources; the very things that make it less politically attractive than an advertising ban.
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